File:Figure 1- AHRQ’s Standard Competitive Process for Selecting Grant Recipients (7045774615).jpg

This image is excerpted from a U.S. GAO report: www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-332

COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Process for Awarding Recovery Act Funds and Disseminating Results

a Each application is reviewed by three peer reviewers who assign preliminary scores.

b AHRQ establishes a minimum score, or triage line, that the grant applications must receive in order to proceed to the next level of peer review. The triage line is established so that the number of applications that fall above the triage line can be reasonably reviewed by the peer review panel at the next stage; the poorest-scoring 50 percent to 60 percent of applications are eliminated; or the peer review panel can review about three times the number of applications AHRQ anticipates funding under a given FOA.

c The summary statement includes peer reviewers’ written critiques, budget recommendations, administrative notes, and the final overall impact score for the application.

d “Rank order” refers to the relative position of an application among a listing of applications that have undergone peer review. The listing of applications is ranked in the order of the overall impact score calculated during the peer review process, from most to least meritorious.

e The program official is the AHRQ official responsible for the program area of the FOA.

f “Out-of-order funding” occurs when applications are funded out of rank order (i.e., not in accordance with the rank order of most-meritorious to least-meritorious based on the overall impact scores calculated during the peer review process). A program official may recommend and the agency may ultimately decide to make out-of-order funding decisions for a number of reasons including the need to address important agency research priorities, avoid duplication, or meet specific requirements in the original FOA that the more meritorious applications cannot meet. The Director of AHRQ makes the final determination to fund grant applications, including any out-of-order funding decisions. For any out-of-order funding decision, a justification memo is prepared to provide written justification of why out-of-order funding is being recommended.